The InfoSec Wheel

In the conventional realm of information security, there tend to be two main groups:

1) The Red Team, employees or contractors hired to be Attackers, ethical hackers that work for an Organization finding security holes that a malicious individual could exploit.

2) The Blue Team, the Organization’s Defenders, who are responsible for protective measures within an Organization.

While it is good to have people dedicated to secure an Organization through defense or attack methods, Organizations and their systems do not stay static. Additional processes, automations, products and being built constantly — with the potential attack surface area growing with each new change or integration.

Only having Red and Blue Security Teams is not enough. The people building what must be defended need to be included.

Red, Blue and Yellow are our Primary Colours. Combine two of them and you get Secondary Colors

Refer to the article here - https://hackernoon.com/introducing-the-infosec-colour-wheel-blending-developers-with-red-and-blue-security-teams-6437c1a07700 

Automating threat actor tracking

As seen in recent sophisticated cyberattacks, especially human-operated campaigns, it’s critical to not only detect an attack as early as possible but also to rapidly determine the scope of the compromise and predict how it will progress. How an attack proceeds depends on the attacker’s goals and the set of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that they utilize to achieve these goals. Hence, quickly associating observed behaviors and characteristics to threat actors provides important insights that can empower organizations to better respond to attacks.

Microsoft uses statistical methods to improve our ability to track specific threat actors and the TTPs associated with them. Threat actor tracking is a constant arms race: as defenders implement new detection and mitigation methods, attackers are quick to modify techniques and behaviors to evade detection or attribution. Manually mapping specific indicators like files, IP addresses, or known techniques to threat actors and keeping track of changes over time isn’t effective or scalable.

To tackle this challenge, Microsoft has built a probabilistic models that enable us to quickly predict the likely threat group responsible for an attack, as well as the likely next attack stages. With these models, security analysts can move from a manual method of investigating small sets of disparate signals to probabilistic determinations of likely threat groups based on all activity observed, comparing the activity against all known behaviors, both past and present, encoded in the model. These models help threat intelligence teams stay current on threat actor activity and help analysts quickly identify behaviors they need to analyze when investigating an attack.

The model enriches targeted attack notifications with additional context on the threat, the likely attacker and their motivation, the steps the said attacker is likely to make next, and the immediate action the customer can take to contain and remediate the attack. Below we discuss an incident in which automated threat actor tracking translated to real-world protection against a human-operated ransomware attack.

Read the full article by Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team - https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/04/01/automating-threat-actor-tracking-understanding-attacker-behavior-for-intelligence-and-contextual-alerting/

Cyber Security Post Covid

Security Awareness Infographich

 

Forrester 2021 Predictions

Provided below are some of the predictions for 2021 by Forrester.

In 2021, Remote Work will rise to 300% of pre-COVID levels

Most companies will employ a hybrid work model, with fewer people in the office and more full-time remote employees. As a major portion of the workforce develops the skills and preference for effective remote work, they will come to expect a work-fromanywhere strategy from their company rather than an exception-driven remote-work policy. Expect this to reshape talent acquisition, moving right into talent poaching, as the most desirable workers seek location agnostic work opportunities.

33% of data breaches in 2021 will be caused by insider incidents, up from 25% in 2020

Remote work drives uptick in insider threats. Three major factors that will produce an uptick in insider threats:

1) the rapid push of users, including some outside of companies’ typical security controls, to remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic;

2) employees’ job insecurity;

3) the increased ease of moving stolen company data.

Combined, these will produce an increase of 8 percentage points in insider incidents, from 25% in 2020 to 33% in 2021

30% of firms will increase spend on cloud, security and risk, networks and mobility

Leading CIOs will embrace cloud-first and platform strategies for speed and adaptiveness, eschewing stovepipes for end-to-end solutions. Interviews with leading CIOs found that they are collaborating more across organizations, objectives, and budgets, extending IT-business partnerships into enterpriselevel shared accountability. They will also invest aggressively in employees, breaking down old ideals and resolving resistance within the organization.

CIOs focused on employee experience (EX) will help their firms attract, develop, and retain talent that can provide competitive advantage in a critical year. 

CIOs who are slow or unable to adapt will have at least two problems on their hands: 

1) massive attrition 

2) getting mired in short-term fixes, like tech modernization, simplification, and consolidation, that achieve only digital sameness through peer-comparison strategies by the end of 2021

The global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% in 2021

The impact of the global pandemic reinforced the tremendous value and necessity of cloud computing to the world’s economy and workforce. Without cloud apps, tools, and services, businesses could not have sent millions of workers home, maintained global supply chains, or shifted entire industry business models in a matter of weeks. 

The changes brought about by COVID-19 forced companies to prioritize speed and customer experience over cost savings and efficiency — and they flocked to public cloud services faster than ever. It is predicted that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021.

Regulatory and legal activity related to employee privacy infringements will double

Forrester predicts that in 2021, regulatory and legal activity regarding employee privacy will double. While European regulators are already enforcing privacy rules to protect employees’ personal data, countries such as Brazil, India, and Thailand will soon do the same. Companies must take a “privacy by design” approach when handling employee personal data. Doing this entails identifying and following all relevant requirements, including and beyond privacy; assessing specific privacy and ethical risks; and communicating transparently with employees.

Detailed Predictions: https://go.forrester.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Forrester_Predictions_2021.pdf

Risk Management Frameworks

One of the key elements for effective Threat Mitigation through appropriate Control Implementation is to correctly identify the Risk associated, without which the ability to Detect & Protect Security Gaps, Operating Costs and Strategic Roadmaps would get affected.

Effective Red Teaming or Adversary Emulation

The Colored Teams -

Red Teaming landscape -

Red Teaming approach -

The Attack Kill Chain -

Purple team stands for collaborative workflows -

Red Team focus areas -

A pragmatic approach to improve an Organization’s Security Posture

As the Security threat landscape, these days, changes and evolves on such a frequent basis, it has becomes imperative to stay vigilant of the Cyber criminals and their ever changing tactics and techniques in a continuous manner. Organizations traditionally invest on keeping themselves updated/vigilant about the latest developments in the threat landscape through the adoption of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) capabilities. Various information sources such as Blog posts, Tweets, Research papers, White papers, Vendor reports, Threat reports, Organization’s own Telemetry etc. are processed, analyzed using advance Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to generate actionable intelligence such as indicators of compromise (IOC), malware source IP addresses, domain names, email addresses, malicious file hashes etc. for proactive defense against these threat vectors. This traditional CTI approach to stay vigilant, however, is a very daunting task as it definitely has some limitations and challenges, such as –

·         Apart from the ML and AI, it also requires a lot of manual time and effort to read and analyze Research papers, White papers, Vendor reports, Threat reports etc. to understand the context and generate actionable intelligence.

·         Validating the actionable intelligence is also time and effort intensive and monotonous work, which eventually could have significant false positives for Blue Teams and Operations Teams.

·         Actionable intelligence could be susceptible to changes as aspects like indicators of compromise (IOC), malware source IP addresses, domain names, email addresses, malicious file hashes etc. could change, rendering the proactive detection rules useless.

·         A major portion of the CTI generated may not be relevant for the Organization’s technology footprint.

·         A huge contribution towards getting relevant real time threat intelligence is subscription based and eventually it has cost implications.

In light of the above limitations/challenges and David Bianco's Pyramid of Pain, adoption of MITRE ATT&CK Framework provides a structured way to describe adversary Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP) and behavior and allows a more widespread alignment across multiple Cyber Security domains viz. Threat Intelligence & Threat Hunting, Red Teaming, Risk Management, Intrusion Detection & Response, Security Engineering, 3^rd Party/Vendor Risk Assessment etc.

The Pyramid of Pain – “shows the relationship between the types of indicators you might use to detect an adversary's activities and how much pain it will cause them when you are able to deny those indicators to them”. This means, it is very easy for an adversary to change the malware source IP addresses, domain names, email addresses, malicious file hashes etc. to make rendering the proactive detection rules useless; however, it is very difficult for an adversary to change the tactics, techniques and procedures.

Hence instead of depending on just the IOCs and actionable intelligence to achieve resilience, adopting a TTP based detection and alerting mechanism is preferred. This is where adoption of MITRE ATT&CK Framework becomes the need of the hour to create a more effective threat-based awareness of Security loopholes that adversaries could exploit. This in turn improves the actionability of CTI for effective defense against these threat vectors.

Additionally, this framework could be leveraged to take strategic and tactical decisions around Vendor Partnership or 3^rd Party Security Software/Service investments. Plotting the coverage of these Vendors/Products against the detection/alerting/remediation capabilities against the ATT&CK TTPs and the Organization’s Security loopholes can channelize the Vendor Partnership or 3^rd Party Security Software/Service investments in the most pragmatic manner.

A quick snapshot of an Cyber Security Domains

This is a brief & conceptual map of all the major focus areas of Cyber Security. This is more of a quick snapshot of the Cyber Security Domains that requires proper planning and strategies carved out to improve an Organization's overall Security posture.    

Further, to deep dive into each of these sub areas, you may dissect it further to get a more granular picture of what all sub areas require more attention and focus.

Note: In no way this is a limited to or an exhaustive list at all, rather a POV representation.

 

Strategic Paths to Cyber Security